Syndicate

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

The business was never viable, running operating losses of more than $3 million for four straight years. “To be sure,” Harmon wrote to Narayan in a May 2014 email, “our revenue sucks. Our balance sheet is a disaster.” Ticket Reserve would have been sunk if not for the fact that Narayan stole money from Oswalt, Peavy, and Sanchez and redirected it to TTR without their consent or knowledge. This was how Narayan “raised” 90 percent of of TTR’s investment capital. For his efforts, TTR paid Narayan finder’s fees of more than $1.8 million.

Oswalt did agree to invest $300,000 in TTR, but instead of deducting the agreed upon sum, Narayan removed over $7 million from his account. Sanchez agreed to invest $100,000, but instead of doing that, Narayan perplexingly removed $7 million from Peavy’s account, who never even heard of TTR, much less agreed to invest in it. To authorize all these transfers, Narayan forged signatures.

Narayan’s partners at TTR helped cover up the fraud, according to the lawsuit, by engaging in “Ponzi-like payments”—using new fraudulently-obtained proceeds to cover the tracks of old ones.

Throughout spring training and his terrible start to the regular season, Jake Peavy had a secret, that he might have lost more than $15 million to a financial adviser who allegedly redirected money that was supposed to go into safe investments toward a sports-ticket brokerage that eventually failed.

On Tuesday, the secret was revealed when the Securities and Exchange Commission said it filed suit in U.S. District Court in Dallas seeking to freeze the assets of the adviser, Ash Narayan, and recoup more than $33 million he allegedly took from three professional athletes under the fraudulent scheme.